Snowball
Earth is an interesting hypothesis and shows us some things about the
climate
system of Earth - that it is a complex dynamic system with many
variables.
The more recent snowball Earth glaciations are thought to have happened
as
three or four glaciation events with the most recent, the Marinoan,
happening
about 650 million years ago. At the beginning of these glaciations the
CO2 was
relatively low for the time and the continents were distributed around
the
equator.
The mechanism which started the cooling periods is not known, but if
they are
cold enough the resulting ice can spread down to close to the equator.
As ice
has a higher albedo, about ~60% compared to the sea which reflects
about 6% of
incoming light, we get a "positive" feedback where cooling reflects
more of the suns energy away from the Earth causing more cooling. This
locked
the Earth into a frozen period for millions of years. This poses a
problem how
can the climate system unfreeze now most of the Sun's energy is
reflected away?
With much of the Earth frozen, CO2 will build up as there is very
little rock
weathering as it is all covered by ice and not much photosynthesis
either. By
the end of the snowball Earth period, CO2 may have risen to 12,000 ppm.
The
warming effect of the CO2 would have been weaker in this frozen state
then it
is now, because CO2 traps infrared radiation while most of the sun's
light was
being reflected in the visible part of the spectrum. This is why the
CO2 level
had to raise to such a high level to bring us out of this cold phase
even
though we are presently in a much warmer climate with less CO2. This
is
physics!
So what? Recycling alone handles virtually all of that hypothetical supply problem.
Only if the population does not increase, otherwise new resources will have to be gathered or we have a drop in the amount of our material goods.
The first sentence isn't true. Peak oil is quite consistent with free market theory. And the "tripling" in price of oil is the price signal that will encourage people to seek alternatives to oil.
But what happens in that transistion period when the oil price sky rockets? There are trillions of dollars of resources sunk in the petrochemical infrastructure. It will take at least an equal amount of resources and money to replace that with a new energy resource. For this to happen without problems the infrastructure has to be put in place before the shortage and therefore before the market has naturally responded.
Therefore we should be intelligent and realise what the future is likely to bring upon us and act with plenty of time to spare. However too many talk about the cost and how everything is OK now. Yes things are OK now, but what about 20 years time?
The water estimate is way off if you actually want to grow and produce things. Considering that agriculture is ~70% of our water consumption and industry is ~20% you can see we are not factoring in alot of water in this calculation.
The linked document estimates 350 million cubic meters of fresh water is required. Considering that the USA alone consumes 470 million cubic meters of fresh water you can see that it gives a very false impression of the resource use of the human race.
So in essence the document is interesting but does not show that we have plenty more resources because it does not factor in much of our actual consumption.
While beta amyloid is like a prion in that the protein is "misfolded" and forms a tangled insoluble protein mass. It is not "contagious" like a prion disease. Beta amyloid is formed after cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein by alpha-, beta- and gamma- secretase.
The current state of knowledge for Alzheimer's is still very hazy, for many years there has been a discussion whether amyloid plaques are the cause of Alzhiemer's or a symptom of some other problem. More pieces of the puzzle are continually being found but what is really happening still remains elusive. An article I read in New Scientist suggested that the plaques themselves may not be the problem. With the real damage being done by the shorter chains which are created when the amyloid precursor protein is first cleaved.
There may be links to prion diseases. This study in mice suggests that non-infectious prions make Alzheimer's worse. While this older story suggests their may be a protective effect. Bleeding edge science can be confusing:)
I've noted Slashdot has a hell of an establishment bias regarding Dark Matter, so don't be surprised if you've never heard of McGaughs paper.
I don't like dark matter as an explanation for anomolies in galaxy rotation. Nor do I want to believe inflation, which apparently solves many problems with the Big Bang theory. But what I have learned to accept is that there is usually a good reason why the consensus theory is considered more likely. For instance with dark matter it can explain many different problems like galaxy rotation, the mass of galaxies, gamma ray fog in the Universe, formation of structures in the Universe...
Also dark matter ties neatly with particle physics, the most popular extension to the standard model, super symmetry, predicts a plethora of new particles. The neutralino for instance fits the bill as a dark matter candidate very well.
Of course we may be right that dark matter is the wrong explanation, but the more likely truth is the majority of physicists are correct on this issue. Damn inflation, I hate it!
So we have been breeding plants with fish and insects for thousands of years? Yeah...uhh no. If you would read up on the technique involved they are "shotgunning" DNA from different species of all different sorts into plants and then patenting any that show "good traits" the problem is by using the shotgun method you end up with a LOT of "free-rider" DNA that frankly we don't have a clue in hell what will do because it has never been and wasn't created in plants in the first place.
The issue with GM is not where the genes come from. The basic genetic machinery is very similar between species and even domains of life, the genetic material does not possess a certain "fishiness" or "insecteness". What GM is doing is very similar to what viruses have been doing since life began. The only difference is that GM is more targeted to our wishes.
The shotgunnung argument is fairly weak as that is even a greater problem with traditional breeding. Each hybridisation results in many different genetic changes and we choose the ones which show "good traits". In fact the point of GM is the targeted manipulation of genetic material which limits "free rider" DNA.
The reason to be wary of GM is it's power to transform a species attributes. Of course we have many technologies which are powerful and yet we manage quite well. The problem with GM is as OzPeter says, "If a pharma company releases a drug that is later proven to be a bad idea then you can do a recall and destroy all known stocks. With GM crops you can't do this as once it is in the wild it is in the wild.".
In the fullness of time a GM species will be created with the desired characteristics, yet its capability to change its ecosystem will not be fully appreciated. This will result in a costly mistake which will tarnish GM technology. Therefore to prevent this likely scenario we can either:-
Do as we do now, test GM organisms for safety. These measures will not prevent all problems, some may be serious.
No GM.
Have some sort of kill switch built in.
Make the species infertile.
None of these solutions are perfect though I would suggest that making a GM species infertile would be the most workable. Unfortunately this would put even more power in the hands of companies like Monsanto and destroy one of the great things about GM. GM’s potential could be greatest in developing countries to make drought and salt resistant crops. Or crops which have a greater nutritional value. If these cannot be propagated then their advantage to the developing world is severely hampered.
Finally whatever you do don't create GM food plants with powerful drugs in you do not want to eat!
I'm not defending the GP's post but to describe nuclear power as cheap, at least historically, is not true.
The reason France's electricity is so cheap is because the government sets the price and has subsidised the cost. Recently EDF have been investigated for price fixing because of this.
The real reason why no nuclear power plants have been constructed for decades in many countries is mostly because gas and coal were cheaper. The fact that some considered it to be unsafe was a secondary issue. Now that gas prices are rising and there is growing concern about the environmental effects of coal, nuclear power starts looking competitive again.
I do agree that the root cause of WW2 was the situation caused by WW1. If the Treaty of Versailles was fair and left Germany territory alone then the situation in Germany would not have been as conducive to Hitler's rise to power.
The question you raise, "how come only Britain and France get to have an Empire?" is very interesting. I guess the difference between Britain's and France's empire building compared to Hitler's was that Britain and France conquered much weaker and culturally distant countries. Germany attacked it's peers who were more able to raise a defense. The differing "World" opinion between Germany's actions and the others is probably hypocritical but it was also obviously foreseeable and therefore unwise on Hilter's part.
But on the subject of truth and lies, Hitler never started World War II, either. Britain and France had decided that Germany had to be taken down long before the actual Polish invasion. In fact Chamberlain said, in May 1939 "the fate of Poland depends on the final outcome of the war, which will depend on our ability to defeat Germany rather than to aid Poland at the beginning.".
I would not come to the conclusion based on prior events. From 1933 Hitler abolished democracy, re-militarized, tore up the Treaty of Versailles and reintroduced conscription. By 1935 Russia, the UK and others were trying to build pacts with each other because they could see where this was going! In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria then just before your quote of Chamberlain, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
In my view Hitler had started the road to WW2 probably by 1935 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland were the final straw. But because of Germany's head start France, UK, Russia and others were not willing to put their unprepared countries on the battlefield.
A flight of fancy of mine recently is the idea of using high powered CPUs as heaters. Imagine if every hair dryer and electric grill was part of a massive distributed computing effort. When my girlfriend is drying her hair should could be computing the folding of proteins!
Shame the least likely part is me having a girlfriend.:(
+5 Insightful. The up, down vote implies you either agree or disagree with the post itself. This seems to duplicate the normal moderation system on one hand. Whilst making it likely people will vote based on your own bias on the topic.
The older system was actually about moderating the moderation which is what I thought meta-moderation was about.
I tried to find numbers for you but I was out of luck:(
From what I can gather the actual directly induced current is pretty small so unless you wire is 10 miles long you probably won't notice anything. In fact most of the problems are not caused by a changing magnetic field directly effecting the wire but by the ring current. Therefore the problems seen in telephone lines and the electric grid is due to current in the ground finding a better path through the wire instead.
In regard to the power lines the problem is not caused by massive currents overheating the wire but the relatively small direct current interfering in the magnetic field within the transformer. This sets up harmonics which cause the core to heat up due to increased resistance. As these effects will not be present in a small device they will be unaffected unless a power surge through the electric grid takes them out.
Thinking of space as a way to try to solve issues of overpopulation and related problems is currently totally wrong headed. The simple reasons are that space is such an unbelievably harsh environment and fucking expensive to get there.
It would be far cheaper to build under the sea, deep underground or 1000's of 1000m skyscrapers. Where animals could be raised and plants grown under artificial lights using hydroponics. If we ever got to the point where we have fully utilised all space on Earth then we would have to think that our species is dumb. It would make sense to leave places unused for natural habitats and as a buffer for future catastrophe.
Even as a protection from apocalyptic events space is not necessarily the place to be. There are only a small number of rare events which could make Earth more inhospitable than the moon or Mars. In fact these events tend to be the ones which would hit the moon/Mars just as hard. For instance if you consider the most massive meteorites in the last billion years. Habitats underground in the right locations would be likely to survive. After only a few months the environment will be less harsh than Mars' even if most of the plants and animals die out.
If I get your question right you want to understand how a black hole can hold charge and thereby influence things beyond the event horizon. Even though the event horizon prevents things inside from ever coming out again. It seems to me that if you assume the mass of a black hole is the property of only the matter inside it you have the same problem. Therefore it is better to consider the black hole as like a massive elementary particle from the out side which can have the following three properties; charge, mass and angular momentum. Note spin is different though similar to angular momentum and current theories treat black holes as having rotation NOT quantum spin.
Another perspective would be to consider an electron, how does an electron "hold" charge and influence space around it. If you can answer that then maybe you are close to how a black hole does.
Finally to measure a black hole's charge would be to compare the deflection of charged matter compared to neutral matter near it. So in theory it should be quite simple, though rather difficult in practise.
Alcohol is a depressant. This is because it acts to increase GABA the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter. As the concentration of ethanol increases more and more subtypes of GABA are affected. This increasing inhibitory effect will lead to different degrees of inhibitory response in different parts of the brain.
So at first you have a relaxing euphoric effect, some more and you may not remember much until your nervous system is "very depressed" and you can't even walk.
When drugs are described as a stimulant or depressant the most clear cut way of seeing which is which is to see how it affects the nervous system.
I hate to break it to you, but it sounds like the headaches are caused by Capsicum/endorphin withdrawl...
Talk about jumping to conclusions. Capsicum analgesic effect is probably little to do with endorphins as popularly thought. It interacts with the TRPV1 receptor which causes the burning pain. The interesting part is that endocannabinoid anandamide is an activator of this system and paracetamol is also an agonist to TRPV.
A related phenomena to the chilli high (in my mind) is the runner's high. There seems to be a debate if the effect is caused by endorphins, anandamide or some other mechanism. As in most real life cases it is probably a result of many different systems including these. Which may not only explain the runner's high but the pain relief many experience due to exercise. But either way I have not heard of people suffering from head aches because they haven't had their run!
I couldn't find any evidence for an endorphin withdraw as such, the opiates have many symptoms related to withdrawal so if ffreeloader is also experiencing the following symptoms before his chilli hit you may be on to something.:)
sweating, malaise, anxiety, depression, priapism, extra sensitivity of the genitals in females, general feeling of heaviness, cramp-like pains in the limbs, excessive yawning or sneezing, tears, rhinorrhea, sleep difficulties (insomnia), cold sweats, chills, severe muscle and bone aches; nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, cramps, and fever.
You say, "The problem is that these so-called "climate scientists" assume that measured solar irradiance is in one-to-one correspondence with energy transport from sun to earth. What about poorly or incorrectly measured wavelengths of solar output? What about magnetic coupling from sun to earth? What about other forms of radiation, particles/solar wind streaming from the sun to earth? What about the effect of CMEs hitting or not hitting the earth?"
All you did was suggest a bunch of stuff you have no clue about and therefore suggest no-one else does.
The first thing to note is recent solar activity has not correlated very well with global temperatures. You might expect an 11 or 22 year cycle would be present in these measurements if the solar cycle had such an influence.
Also there are a number of observatories which observe the sun 24 hours a day. So the likelihood that the scientists are missing massive amounts of energy emitted by the Sun is very very low.
STEREO
Which has these separate instruments.
- SECCHI 5 Cameras which study the sun for corona mass ejections in the UV and visible light spectrum.
- IMPACT Looks at the distribution of the solar wind particles, electrons and interplanetary magnetic field.
- PLASTIC Measures the solar winds plasma.
- SWAVES Looks at radio frequencies from the sun.
As well as other probes in space dedicated to observe the Sun:-
SOHO Another sun observatory Advanced Composition Explorer an explorer mission to study the solar wind and cosmic rays. TRACE Observes the sun's surface. Solar Dynamics Observatory An orbiter designed to study the solar atmosphere and understands the sun's influence on Earth. It will collect data on the Sun's magnetic field, how it is stored and released into the heliosphere and geosphere.
Totally agree, without a much better way of storing power and more efficient lasers, projectile weapons are just so much better. If you want a bit more stopping power just use the anti-matter bullets.
There has been some attempts in the past to marry electromagnetism and gravity. This was because some of the equations look very similar, one of the most famous attempts is the "Kaluza Klein theory". This extends general relativity to 5 dimensions from there Einstein's and Mazwell's equations "pop" out. However it never got further than that as there are problems with the theory. But as I am not a physicist I have no idea on the merits or drawbacks of this approach.
A more recent hypothesis to explain gravity was by Erik Verlinde who tries to explain gravity as an entropic force. An emergent property coming from the degrees of freedom present when matter is around. In the 1970s results from calculations on black holes threw up a number of intriguing connections between thermodynamics and black holes, this led to the "holographic principle". Looks up some of these terms, they are quite fascinating though who knows if they are the right track.
Isn't that SmallFurryCreature's point? Africa lacks the industrial base which is how Europe, North America and Asia became industrialised and leading world economies. There isn't a African windup clock because the competition from China would prevent a windup clock radio industry from ever starting up (as SmallFurryCreature said in his post).
The incumbent companies have the advantages, the capitol, the infrastructure and the expertise to under cut or out do most start-ups. The new entrant to a market needs some edge over its competitors but how can a poor country beat a cheap highly competitive rival like China? The usual answer is for the country wishing to start a new industry is ignore the patents and other IP protections. Copy a product and erect trade barriers to enable their new industry to gain a foothold.
Ahh but the world is more complicated than that. If there is a large amount of aerosols so that the dimming effect is large than it is true that it will reduce photosynthesis. However diffuse aerosols, especially if they are high in the atmosphere, scatter sunlight providing shaded areas with more light so plants can photosynthesize better in shaded areas.
Slashdot Mirror
Snowball Earth is an interesting hypothesis and shows us some things about the climate system of Earth - that it is a complex dynamic system with many variables.
The more recent snowball Earth glaciations are thought to have happened as three or four glaciation events with the most recent, the Marinoan, happening about 650 million years ago. At the beginning of these glaciations the CO2 was relatively low for the time and the continents were distributed around the equator.
The mechanism which started the cooling periods is not known, but if they are cold enough the resulting ice can spread down to close to the equator. As ice has a higher albedo, about ~60% compared to the sea which reflects about 6% of incoming light, we get a "positive" feedback where cooling reflects more of the suns energy away from the Earth causing more cooling. This locked the Earth into a frozen period for millions of years. This poses a problem how can the climate system unfreeze now most of the Sun's energy is reflected away?
With much of the Earth frozen, CO2 will build up as there is very little rock weathering as it is all covered by ice and not much photosynthesis either. By the end of the snowball Earth period, CO2 may have risen to 12,000 ppm. The warming effect of the CO2 would have been weaker in this frozen state then it is now, because CO2 traps infrared radiation while most of the sun's light was being reflected in the visible part of the spectrum. This is why the CO2 level had to raise to such a high level to bring us out of this cold phase even though we are presently in a much warmer climate with less CO2. This is physics!
So what? Recycling alone handles virtually all of that hypothetical supply problem.
Only if the population does not increase, otherwise new resources will have to be gathered or we have a drop in the amount of our material goods.
The first sentence isn't true. Peak oil is quite consistent with free market theory. And the "tripling" in price of oil is the price signal that will encourage people to seek alternatives to oil.
But what happens in that transistion period when the oil price sky rockets? There are trillions of dollars of resources sunk in the petrochemical infrastructure. It will take at least an equal amount of resources and money to replace that with a new energy resource. For this to happen without problems the infrastructure has to be put in place before the shortage and therefore before the market has naturally responded.
Therefore we should be intelligent and realise what the future is likely to bring upon us and act with plenty of time to spare. However too many talk about the cost and how everything is OK now. Yes things are OK now, but what about 20 years time?
??
The water estimate is way off if you actually want to grow and produce things. Considering that agriculture is ~70% of our water consumption and industry is ~20% you can see we are not factoring in alot of water in this calculation.
The linked document estimates 350 million cubic meters of fresh water is required. Considering that the USA alone consumes 470 million cubic meters of fresh water you can see that it gives a very false impression of the resource use of the human race.
So in essence the document is interesting but does not show that we have plenty more resources because it does not factor in much of our actual consumption.
While beta amyloid is like a prion in that the protein is "misfolded" and forms a tangled insoluble protein mass. It is not "contagious" like a prion disease. Beta amyloid is formed after cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein by alpha-, beta- and gamma- secretase.
The current state of knowledge for Alzheimer's is still very hazy, for many years there has been a discussion whether amyloid plaques are the cause of Alzhiemer's or a symptom of some other problem. More pieces of the puzzle are continually being found but what is really happening still remains elusive. An article I read in New Scientist suggested that the plaques themselves may not be the problem. With the real damage being done by the shorter chains which are created when the amyloid precursor protein is first cleaved.
There may be links to prion diseases. This study in mice suggests that non-infectious prions make Alzheimer's worse. While this older story suggests their may be a protective effect. Bleeding edge science can be confusing :)
I've noted Slashdot has a hell of an establishment bias regarding Dark Matter, so don't be surprised if you've never heard of McGaughs paper.
I don't like dark matter as an explanation for anomolies in galaxy rotation. Nor do I want to believe inflation, which apparently solves many problems with the Big Bang theory. But what I have learned to accept is that there is usually a good reason why the consensus theory is considered more likely. For instance with dark matter it can explain many different problems like galaxy rotation, the mass of galaxies, gamma ray fog in the Universe, formation of structures in the Universe...
Also dark matter ties neatly with particle physics, the most popular extension to the standard model, super symmetry, predicts a plethora of new particles. The neutralino for instance fits the bill as a dark matter candidate very well.
Of course we may be right that dark matter is the wrong explanation, but the more likely truth is the majority of physicists are correct on this issue. Damn inflation, I hate it!
So we have been breeding plants with fish and insects for thousands of years? Yeah...uhh no. If you would read up on the technique involved they are "shotgunning" DNA from different species of all different sorts into plants and then patenting any that show "good traits" the problem is by using the shotgun method you end up with a LOT of "free-rider" DNA that frankly we don't have a clue in hell what will do because it has never been and wasn't created in plants in the first place.
The issue with GM is not where the genes come from. The basic genetic machinery is very similar between species and even domains of life, the genetic material does not possess a certain "fishiness" or "insecteness". What GM is doing is very similar to what viruses have been doing since life began. The only difference is that GM is more targeted to our wishes.
The shotgunnung argument is fairly weak as that is even a greater problem with traditional breeding. Each hybridisation results in many different genetic changes and we choose the ones which show "good traits". In fact the point of GM is the targeted manipulation of genetic material which limits "free rider" DNA.
The reason to be wary of GM is it's power to transform a species attributes. Of course we have many technologies which are powerful and yet we manage quite well. The problem with GM is as OzPeter says, "If a pharma company releases a drug that is later proven to be a bad idea then you can do a recall and destroy all known stocks. With GM crops you can't do this as once it is in the wild it is in the wild.".
In the fullness of time a GM species will be created with the desired characteristics, yet its capability to change its ecosystem will not be fully appreciated. This will result in a costly mistake which will tarnish GM technology. Therefore to prevent this likely scenario we can either:-
None of these solutions are perfect though I would suggest that making a GM species infertile would be the most workable. Unfortunately this would put even more power in the hands of companies like Monsanto and destroy one of the great things about GM. GM’s potential could be greatest in developing countries to make drought and salt resistant crops. Or crops which have a greater nutritional value. If these cannot be propagated then their advantage to the developing world is severely hampered.
Finally whatever you do don't create GM food plants with powerful drugs in you do not want to eat!
I'm not defending the GP's post but to describe nuclear power as cheap, at least historically, is not true.
The reason France's electricity is so cheap is because the government sets the price and has subsidised the cost. Recently EDF have been investigated for price fixing because of this.
The real reason why no nuclear power plants have been constructed for decades in many countries is mostly because gas and coal were cheaper. The fact that some considered it to be unsafe was a secondary issue. Now that gas prices are rising and there is growing concern about the environmental effects of coal, nuclear power starts looking competitive again.
I do agree that the root cause of WW2 was the situation caused by WW1. If the Treaty of Versailles was fair and left Germany territory alone then the situation in Germany would not have been as conducive to Hitler's rise to power.
The question you raise, "how come only Britain and France get to have an Empire?" is very interesting. I guess the difference between Britain's and France's empire building compared to Hitler's was that Britain and France conquered much weaker and culturally distant countries. Germany attacked it's peers who were more able to raise a defense. The differing "World" opinion between Germany's actions and the others is probably hypocritical but it was also obviously foreseeable and therefore unwise on Hilter's part.
But on the subject of truth and lies, Hitler never started World War II, either. Britain and France had decided that Germany had to be taken down long before the actual Polish invasion. In fact Chamberlain said, in May 1939 "the fate of Poland depends on the final outcome of the war, which will depend on our ability to defeat Germany rather than to aid Poland at the beginning.".
I would not come to the conclusion based on prior events. From 1933 Hitler abolished democracy, re-militarized, tore up the Treaty of Versailles and reintroduced conscription. By 1935 Russia, the UK and others were trying to build pacts with each other because they could see where this was going! In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria then just before your quote of Chamberlain, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
In my view Hitler had started the road to WW2 probably by 1935 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland were the final straw. But because of Germany's head start France, UK, Russia and others were not willing to put their unprepared countries on the battlefield.
A flight of fancy of mine recently is the idea of using high powered CPUs as heaters. Imagine if every hair dryer and electric grill was part of a massive distributed computing effort. When my girlfriend is drying her hair should could be computing the folding of proteins!
:(
Shame the least likely part is me having a girlfriend.
+5 Insightful. The up, down vote implies you either agree or disagree with the post itself. This seems to duplicate the normal moderation system on one hand. Whilst making it likely people will vote based on your own bias on the topic.
The older system was actually about moderating the moderation which is what I thought meta-moderation was about.
From what I can gather the actual directly induced current is pretty small so unless you wire is 10 miles long you probably won't notice anything. In fact most of the problems are not caused by a changing magnetic field directly effecting the wire but by the ring current. Therefore the problems seen in telephone lines and the electric grid is due to current in the ground finding a better path through the wire instead.
In regard to the power lines the problem is not caused by massive currents overheating the wire but the relatively small direct current interfering in the magnetic field within the transformer. This sets up harmonics which cause the core to heat up due to increased resistance. As these effects will not be present in a small device they will be unaffected unless a power surge through the electric grid takes them out.
That should teach you! If you hadn't read the submission you would feel a lot better. :)
Thinking of space as a way to try to solve issues of overpopulation and related problems is currently totally wrong headed. The simple reasons are that space is such an unbelievably harsh environment and fucking expensive to get there.
It would be far cheaper to build under the sea, deep underground or 1000's of 1000m skyscrapers. Where animals could be raised and plants grown under artificial lights using hydroponics. If we ever got to the point where we have fully utilised all space on Earth then we would have to think that our species is dumb. It would make sense to leave places unused for natural habitats and as a buffer for future catastrophe.
Even as a protection from apocalyptic events space is not necessarily the place to be. There are only a small number of rare events which could make Earth more inhospitable than the moon or Mars. In fact these events tend to be the ones which would hit the moon/Mars just as hard. For instance if you consider the most massive meteorites in the last billion years. Habitats underground in the right locations would be likely to survive. After only a few months the environment will be less harsh than Mars' even if most of the plants and animals die out.
If I get your question right you want to understand how a black hole can hold charge and thereby influence things beyond the event horizon. Even though the event horizon prevents things inside from ever coming out again. It seems to me that if you assume the mass of a black hole is the property of only the matter inside it you have the same problem. Therefore it is better to consider the black hole as like a massive elementary particle from the out side which can have the following three properties; charge, mass and angular momentum. Note spin is different though similar to angular momentum and current theories treat black holes as having rotation NOT quantum spin.
Another perspective would be to consider an electron, how does an electron "hold" charge and influence space around it. If you can answer that then maybe you are close to how a black hole does.
Finally to measure a black hole's charge would be to compare the deflection of charged matter compared to neutral matter near it. So in theory it should be quite simple, though rather difficult in practise.
Alcohol is a depressant. This is because it acts to increase GABA the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter. As the concentration of ethanol increases more and more subtypes of GABA are affected. This increasing inhibitory effect will lead to different degrees of inhibitory response in different parts of the brain.
So at first you have a relaxing euphoric effect, some more and you may not remember much until your nervous system is "very depressed" and you can't even walk.
When drugs are described as a stimulant or depressant the most clear cut way of seeing which is which is to see how it affects the nervous system.
I hate to break it to you, but it sounds like the headaches are caused by Capsicum/endorphin withdrawl...
Talk about jumping to conclusions. Capsicum analgesic effect is probably little to do with endorphins as popularly thought. It interacts with the TRPV1 receptor which causes the burning pain. The interesting part is that endocannabinoid anandamide is an activator of this system and paracetamol is also an agonist to TRPV.
:)
A related phenomena to the chilli high (in my mind) is the runner's high. There seems to be a debate if the effect is caused by endorphins, anandamide or some other mechanism. As in most real life cases it is probably a result of many different systems including these. Which may not only explain the runner's high but the pain relief many experience due to exercise. But either way I have not heard of people suffering from head aches because they haven't had their run!
I couldn't find any evidence for an endorphin withdraw as such, the opiates have many symptoms related to withdrawal so if ffreeloader is also experiencing the following symptoms before his chilli hit you may be on to something.
sweating, malaise, anxiety, depression, priapism, extra sensitivity of the genitals in females, general feeling of heaviness, cramp-like pains in the limbs, excessive yawning or sneezing, tears, rhinorrhea, sleep difficulties (insomnia), cold sweats, chills, severe muscle and bone aches; nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, cramps, and fever.
You say, "The problem is that these so-called "climate scientists" assume that measured solar irradiance is in one-to-one correspondence with energy transport from sun to earth. What about poorly or incorrectly measured wavelengths of solar output? What about magnetic coupling from sun to earth? What about other forms of radiation, particles/solar wind streaming from the sun to earth? What about the effect of CMEs hitting or not hitting the earth?"
All you did was suggest a bunch of stuff you have no clue about and therefore suggest no-one else does.
The first thing to note is recent solar activity has not correlated very well with global temperatures. You might expect an 11 or 22 year cycle would be present in these measurements if the solar cycle had such an influence.
Also there are a number of observatories which observe the sun 24 hours a day. So the likelihood that the scientists are missing massive amounts of energy emitted by the Sun is very very low.
STEREO
Which has these separate instruments.
- SECCHI 5 Cameras which study the sun for corona mass ejections in the UV and visible light spectrum.
- IMPACT Looks at the distribution of the solar wind particles, electrons and interplanetary magnetic field.
- PLASTIC Measures the solar winds plasma.
- SWAVES Looks at radio frequencies from the sun.
As well as other probes in space dedicated to observe the Sun:-
SOHO Another sun observatory
Advanced Composition Explorer an explorer mission to study the solar wind and cosmic rays.
TRACE Observes the sun's surface.
Solar Dynamics Observatory An orbiter designed to study the solar atmosphere and understands the sun's influence on Earth. It will collect data on the Sun's magnetic field, how it is stored and released into the heliosphere and geosphere.
Why? There is so much room in here.
Your forgot to mention beer is also tasty!
No no, BP stands for Beyond Petroleum. ;)
They are simply getting rid of the excess oil they no longer need
Totally agree, without a much better way of storing power and more efficient lasers, projectile weapons are just so much better. If you want a bit more stopping power just use the anti-matter bullets.
There has been some attempts in the past to marry electromagnetism and gravity. This was because some of the equations look very similar, one of the most famous attempts is the "Kaluza Klein theory". This extends general relativity to 5 dimensions from there Einstein's and Mazwell's equations "pop" out. However it never got further than that as there are problems with the theory. But as I am not a physicist I have no idea on the merits or drawbacks of this approach.
A more recent hypothesis to explain gravity was by Erik Verlinde who tries to explain gravity as an entropic force. An emergent property coming from the degrees of freedom present when matter is around. In the 1970s results from calculations on black holes threw up a number of intriguing connections between thermodynamics and black holes, this led to the "holographic principle". Looks up some of these terms, they are quite fascinating though who knows if they are the right track.
Isn't that SmallFurryCreature's point? Africa lacks the industrial base which is how Europe, North America and Asia became industrialised and leading world economies. There isn't a African windup clock because the competition from China would prevent a windup clock radio industry from ever starting up (as SmallFurryCreature said in his post).
The incumbent companies have the advantages, the capitol, the infrastructure and the expertise to under cut or out do most start-ups. The new entrant to a market needs some edge over its competitors but how can a poor country beat a cheap highly competitive rival like China? The usual answer is for the country wishing to start a new industry is ignore the patents and other IP protections. Copy a product and erect trade barriers to enable their new industry to gain a foothold.
Ahh but the world is more complicated than that. If there is a large amount of aerosols so that the dimming effect is large than it is true that it will reduce photosynthesis. However diffuse aerosols, especially if they are high in the atmosphere, scatter sunlight providing shaded areas with more light so plants can photosynthesize better in shaded areas.